I’m a relative novice, but I imagine one of the best things about being murdered with a jagged knife is the fact that one dies rather quickly. Conversely, one of the worst fates is surely the mercilessly violent experience of being sawn into, punctured, bloodied, gashed, and hacked at – however quickly the job is done.
Don’t panic! I speak of architecture.
I feel desperately for my beloved city of Sydney. For the past few years, she’s suffered an architectural assassination that has seen her living consciously through all the worst parts of a violent death-by-blade.
Quay Quarter Tower – the assassin – has just been awarded a prestigious prize for ‘the world’s most innovative high rise’ (whatever that means), by the German Architecture Museum, DekaBank, and the City of Frankfurt. The building’s developers and architects can bask in the glory of saving the world from environmentally unfriendly construction and will receive a handy €50,000 to donate to a charity of choice.
Lucky charity. All it cost was the abject trashing of Sydney’s natural beauty and the ruthless culling of any remaining semblance of local architectural cohesion. One should be mightily sceptical of the much-vaunted net-saving of carbon credits, too. Those flashy new offices ought to attract a few more high-flyers into town, and those high-flyers ought to burn a few million tonnes of jet fuel on the journey.
But Quay Quarter isn’t only a flashy new building – it is everything grotesque and obtuse about modern architectural practice in Western cities. It slashes at the cityscape so egotistically that it should be immortalised as a meme for cultural debasement itself.
Running across the Harbour Bridge from the north, the ugly monstrosity saws the city in half, rising and falling in my sightline, hacking ruthlessly away at the sky with every bounding step. From the water, it appears more still, but somehow more vicious by orders of magnitude. Its ‘stacked’ segments are seemingly primed to topple into the streets in an unfriendly visual illusion. From the air it is worse again – like a pile of demented Lego brick and factory seconds from a more perfect world, cast onto the city grid to uglify our lives.
One wonders if the new Labor Prime Minister – a boy from small-scale inner Western Sydney – doesn’t look across his new lawn from Kirribilli, surveying the shredded skyline, and ask himself where it all went wrong…
Architectural crimes are of course, nothing new to Sydney. When One Central Park and its big clusters of glass went up at Chippendale about 10 years ago, that side of the city became imprisoned in a cage of tacky nonsense. It was offset, allegedly, by ‘sky gardens’ (leaves draped over balconies, passed off as ‘innovative’ design).
Another Labor Prime Minister, Paul Keating, for decades promised us that the Western-side development at Barangaroo would be a chance to set things right. That too was a stunning fail. Barangaroo is a festival of faux-sophistication: Its plasticky superstructures are complimented suitably by the uber-botoxed clientele who frequent its forgettable-but-Instagrammable casinos and cafes.
The southern, western, and northern aspects of the city all now stand as triumphs of dumb, egomaniacal architecture, and dumber-yet city planners who allowed the most utterly beautiful natural landscape to be defaced with this ‘award-winning’ criminality.
Only the Eastern facade is holding fast to the last fragments of a rapprochement with nature. Jørn Utzon’s humility still shines from the Opera House like an effervescent beacon, whilst Bradfield’s beautiful and useful Harbour Bridge stands stridently, but sympathetically, across our glistening harbor span.
That harbor is the crown jewel in a country drowning in natural beauty. So much so, it seems, that we can’t help but throw the doors open to unprepossessing taste-makers who defile that beauty. It’s as if, given a head start, we feel some moral obligation to shoot ourselves in both feet, lest the rest of the world feel sorry for itself as ugly sisters to our Cinderella.
New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet encouraged me greatly when in his 2021 Bradfield oration, he put beauty at the very heart of his vision for Sydney. Inspired by the late, great Sir Roger Scruton, the Premier said he ‘wanted to put beauty back in the public square – literally. The first step is to uncover more of the beauty that lies hidden in plain sight’.
I hope that if Perrottet wins re-election next year he indeed does have the bottle to follow through with his plans for Sydney. But I must contest his declaration on what should constitute a first step in re-claiming Sydney’s God-given right to the title of ‘world’s most beautiful city’.
Prior to uncovering ‘the beauty that lies hidden in plain sight’, Perrottet must declare war on the architectural egos that hack at our skyline in pursuit of selfish personal reward, bleeding the life and spirit from city streets.
As Sir Roger once said, what the public suffers from in modern architecture is a ‘cult of ugliness’. Unfortunately, cults reward compulsive behavior, and have done so again in the case of the hideous and conceited Quay Quarter Tower.
In saving Sydney then, it would be best if Perrottet first take those cults on.
Ben Crocker is a Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation Postgraduate Scholar, and Research Fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington DC. His Substack is Crocker’s Columns
